Spike in pedestrian deaths hits nearly all metros

The Memphis area is the deadliest metro in the U.S. for pedestrians, but almost all major cities are getting more hazardous for people who are walking, a new study found.

More than 80% of the largest 101 metro areas in the country have become more dangerous, according to Smart Growth America, a nonprofit group that promotes alternatives to driving. The worsening trend comes as safety advocates and the federal government have also raised the alarm about a surge in pedestrian deaths.

The analysis is based on 2022 data—the latest available from the federal government—when the number of pedestrians killed reached a 40-year high of 7,522. Overall road deaths have since started to decline, but preliminary federal data from 2023 does not include breakdowns of pedestrians, motorists or other road users.

Still, Smart Growth America’s latest “Deadly by Design” report indicates how widespread the problem is in this country.

“In 2009, there were just eight large metro areas that had a pedestrian fatality rate over 2.0 per 100,000 people,” the group noted. “That number more than doubled to 18 metro areas in our 2014 report. Now there are 47 metro areas with a rate over 2.0 people killed per 100,000.”

The most dangerous locations are all in the Sun Belt. The Memphis area had the highest fatality rate, followed by Albuquerque, New Mexico; Tucson, Arizona; Bakersfield, California; Daytona Beach, Florida; and Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Eight Florida and five California regions were among the 20 deadliest urban areas.

“You could go to any region and look at the roadways and the areas designed after 1950, and those are the most dangerous roads without exception,” said Beth Osborne, the director of Transportation for America, which is part of Smart Growth America. “Everything developed after we started building interstates is filled with wide, fast, straight, dangerous roadways for pedestrians and for non-pedestrians…. And most of the South was built in that time.”

Two-thirds of the pedestrian deaths occurred on roads owned by state governments. “That’s true in every state,” Osborne said, explaining that state governments own high-speed roads through developed areas, which are wide and hard for people to cross on foot.

Calvin Gladney, the president and CEO of Smart Growth America, said state agencies also have a different perspective on the function of the roads they control. “The intention of those roads are for the commuters and not for the communities they traverse,” he said. “There’s more of a focus on speed and width of lanes and how fast and efficiently those cars and people in those cars can get through those communities. When you compare that to some locally owned roads … they also think about the folks in those neighborhoods and in those communities.”

Many traffic engineers are trying to address the climbing numbers of pedestrian deaths, Osborne said. “What they tell us is that every one of these projects is an uphill battle. They have to fight against the rules” to make safer streets, she said, and spending the extra time or expense to make exceptions to standard designs can hurt them during performance reviews.

To get more significant change, she said, the designs that encourage slower speeds should become the rule, not the exception.

“It can’t be that a roadway is designed for you to drive super fast and then slow down for a little bit and then go fast again. That’s not going to help. People understand that’s a speed trap,” she said. “When you go to areas where overall the roadways are designed for slower movement, we do find that the overwhelming majority of people go much, much slower. It happens with very low-cost, temporary interventions. Seriously, $14,000 spent in a town in Connecticut saw 5 mile-per-hour drops with just the tiniest intervention.”

Osborne credited Orlando and the state of Florida for writing a “spectacular” guide on roadway design that encourages engineers to use different features depending on whether a road is serving an urban downtown, a rural village or a suburban arterial. “They still have a lot of past damage to undo, and they are still not applying those guides across the board,” she said. “It is going to take a massive implementation of the new approach in every project to undo almost 100 years of damage.”

After the roads are redesigned, local officials can reinforce the need for slower speeds with enforcement that would target the “very small portion of the public” that insists on going faster anyway, she said.

Osborne said road design and vehicle design are what makes U.S. roads more dangerous for pedestrians than those in other industrialized countries, where fatality rates have been declining. Vehicles in the U.S. have become larger with bigger blind spots and more dashboard distractions, she said. But distractions from in-vehicle systems and smartphones have also increased in other countries, she noted.

“We are not unique on the distraction issue,” she said. “We are unique in that human fallibility and distraction leads to death at a much higher rate than with our peers across the world.”

Gladney said putting the brakes on the rise of pedestrian deaths is also the responsibility of elected officials and decision-makers who have not yet responded to the crisis with meaningful changes. “These are decisions of how to allocate budgets, where to make investments and where to say, ‘Enough is enough,’” he said. “We’re tired of teddy bears tied to poles; we’re tired of candles on sidewalks. It is just not acceptable for this many people to die.”